 | Learn more about best practices in medical device packaging development by watching the full interview at Healthcare Packaging. |
 | Read about Hamerslag's tenure at Siemens Healthineers and advice for others in the industry at Healthcare Packaging. |
Elisabeth Cuneo: So, when we initially spoke, you mentioned how you work with both the package material teams and automation teams, and the importance of being able to do that, and merging and bringing the two teams together. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?
James Hamerslag: Sure. So, at the beginning, when the product is in its initial phase of being developed and determined what is the thing that we're going to sell, it's important to engage the manufacturing team, the automation team with the people that are developing the packaging. Because you don't want them, you know, maybe they think they know how it would be done in manufacturing. Manufacturing folks are like, “Oh, no, this is the approach we need. This is the equipment that we have. And this is we need to produce this product on this equipment. So here are the requirements.”
So, you don't want to get down the path at the very end and realize that, “Oh, we can't make this in our manufacturing environment.” So that's why it's important to engage those teams early on.
I mean, one way to think about it is, we are all on the same team. We all work for the same company, so our goals, our objectives need to be aligned.
But a lot of times, the folks that are developing the product, they're being told by their management, “You’ve got to hurry up and develop the product.” But their vision doesn't go past the product development, as opposed to the manufacturing folks, who are going to say, “Okay, we got this product, we got to commercialize it, and sell it to the customer, because that's the only way we make money.”
I mean, everybody else except for operations is overhead. Operations is the only team that brings in revenue.
